The Monster Hunters

  “This is it?” I asked her. She nodded, a movement barely perceptible beneath her robes. It was just after 3:00 a.m. but she was still wearing her mirrored shades. The Mercedes bumped through the foliage, and the undercarriage scraped as we dipped into the deep ruts. I rolled down the window. The chirping of insects was rhythmic and strong. A trio of cow skulls had been tied around a tree with leather cord. I knew that it was a sign that we were on Skippy’s property. “I love what you’ve done with the place.”

  Gretchen clicked approvingly. We continued down the lane, deeper and deeper into the dark woods. Though the compound was only a few miles away, we seemed totally isolated from the world. The trees here were tall and the forest primeval. Glowing eyes reflected back at us as raccoons scurried away.

  “This is kind of creepy,” Trip said.

  “It isn’t so bad,” I answered. Then something huge sprinted across the road through the headlights. It was massive and covered in black fur, and it was gone in an instant. “What the hell was that?” I shouted as I stomped on the brakes. The Mercedes halted on the packed dirt, leaving us in a cloud of red dust. I rolled up the window without thinking.

  “Deer?” asked Holly.

  “That wasn’t no damn deer,” I said. It had looked more like a scurvy bear crossed with a lion. Maybe I had not been getting enough sleep. Gretchen said something unintelligible and made shooing motions for me to continue onward. Apparently, whatever the animal had been, it was of no serious concern to her.

  Flickering lights appeared in the distance. Campfires. Big ones. We slowly rolled forward until we saw the structures of a tiny community. Perhaps village would be the best word. The little houses were clustered tightly together into a rough semicircle. Surprisingly enough the homes looked nice and well cared for, despite the strange decorations of skins, bones, hides, antlers and feathers that decorated all of them. The fires emanated from large basins that had been set at the compass points around the village. There was a central area between the homes, with what appeared to be some sort of shrine or religious stage.

  A black-clad figure appeared in the headlights and waved as we approached. I recognized Skippy from his gait. Other figures appeared from the homes, all of them shorter than average, and several squat ones that must have been children. Many of them were hurriedly pulling on their masks or hoods. I parked the car next to some older-model pickup trucks. Before I had even shut the engine off Gretchen had bailed out of the vehicle and went running toward her husband. He picked her up and swung her around as they joyfully embraced. Several of the others joined them in a massive group hug.

  I stepped out of the car. The air smelled of delicious roasting meat. The sounds that I first thought were angry noises actually were laughter coming from the reunited tribe. Some of the children began to play a game, running and chasing after each other. Skippy left the group when he saw me. Many of them studied us curiously from behind their tinted goggles or mirrored shades.

  “Noble One . . . Thank . . . you . . . bringing . . . Grtxschnns . . . Gret chen . . . home.” He bowed down until his balaclava touched the ground. I bowed back.

  “Thank you, Skippy. Gretchen saved our lives tonight. She healed our many wounds. And her faith and bravery turned away a Master vampire. If it wasn’t for her, many Hunters would have died.”

  “She . . . brings honor . . . to clan?” He rose and spoke loudly in his language. There were some gasps of astonishment as they stepped away from Gretchen, and then bowed to her. I could not see her features, but by her mannerisms, I was guessing that she was slightly embarrassed by the display. After a few seconds they rose and went back to their merry greetings. Finally Gretchen was able to break away and approach us, the rest of the tribe following closely behind her, until finally the whole group was assembled quietly in front of the three of us.

  Gretchen pointed at Trip, and said something to the others. There was much oohing and ahhing, and then they bowed toward him. Skippy’s people were big on the bowing.

  “Uh . . . what’s going on?” he asked, running one hand through his dreads nervously.

  “Dark Hunter . . . you fought . . . gub mint . . . agents . . . to protect Gret chen?” When he said government, the tribe booed.

  “I guess,” he answered.

  “Agents beat you . . .” He pointed at Trip’s face. “For protect her?”

  “Yes. Really, it was no big deal . . . I—”

  Skippy cut him off. He turned back to the tribe and loudly proclaimed: “Smrslal! Smrslal Aiee!” then to us, “Dark skin Hunter, Brother of War Chief, and . . . girl. Bring great honor. My clan . . . you one with . . . us. With honor . . . no need for hide.”

  Skippy reached up and removed his glasses, revealing bright yellow eyes sunk deep into grayish-green tissue. He carefully folded and put the shades in a pocket, and began to remove his balaclava. One by one, the others did so as well. Even the little children removed their hoods, some needing the help of their mothers.

  We had gained the trust and respect of the tribe. Honoring us as equals, they revealed their true selves. Their skin was bumpy, mottled, mostly green, some gray and some brown. They were either bald, or some with wispy white hair. Their lower jaws protruded, and tusklike teeth stuck past their lips. Most of their noses were squat, though some were raised up more like snouts. The eyes were yellow or pale blue, set under thick bone ridges and short foreheads. Their ears were long and pointy, and most if not all of them had facial piercings of bone or gold.

  “Holy shit,” Holly mumbled.

  “Orcs,” Trip said in awe. “I don’t believe it.”

  Skippy’s pointed teeth ground together above his wide jaw, in what I believed was a smile. His yellow eyes twinkled as he clapped his hands above his head. “Urks! Yes. Clan of Gnrlwz, fist of North. Spear of . . . doom. Now clan of . . . M H I. Harb Anger . . . give us home. Give us work. Now are family. Join us . . . eat meat . . . dance.” He pointed at one of the others, who immediately turned and ran for what I thought was a shrine. The younger orc knelt and fiddled with something on the backside of the edifice, and massive hidden speakers started blaring. Metal. The orcs were playing heavy metal.

  “JBL. Kick ass . . . sound system,” Skippy grunted at us. “Come! Party!” The entire tribe began to either bang their heads, dance wildly, or jump up and down with their hands extended above their heads, pointer and pinky fingers extended in the devil horns of classic rock. The children formed a mosh pit and began to slam each other about. The mothers looked on approvingly.

  “Skippy, I wish that we could,” I shouted back over the sounds of Static X. “But we have a mission. We need to fly to Natchy Bottom in the morning.” The orcs danced. Giant wolves howled in the nearby forest. Of course, that explained the thing that had crossed the headlights. You can’t have orcs without wargs.

  Skippy nodded. “Skip understand. I be there . . . Together . . . crush foes. Must take . . . care of clan . . . Then come. To fly into battle.” He bowed again. I returned the honor. “Thank you . . . Noble One.”

  “Great honor, Skippy. Thank you.” We parted. I returned to the car.

  Holly climbed into the front seat. Trip stood transfixed at the rear door, staring at the clan in wonder, as some of the giant wolves wandered out of the tree line and into the light of the fires. Little green children ran to crawl up on the horse-sized animals, playing with what to them were basically family pets. Pets with jaws that could snap a deer in half, but pets nonetheless. Skippy returned to Gretchen and they knocked their tusks together in what was probably the orcish equivalent of a kiss. I started the car. Finally Trip broke away from the sights and got in.

  We drove down the lane. The raucous music died away as the distance increased. We did not speak. Trip stared out the window in silence. The Mercedes bumped and scraped as we bottomed out. It would take a pretty dedicated explorer to bother with this back road and now I could see that that was by design. It was a strange and secret community, but obviously one built
upon strong family bonds of love. My spirits were lifted from my brief visit to Skippy’s people.

  Finally Holly spoke. “Well, Trip. Satisfied now?”

  “Huh?”

  “Remember when we met the elves?”

  He did not answer. But none of us could forget his disappointment on that day.

  “Remember when you said that since there was so much secret evil, there had to be some sort of secret good to balance it out?”

  “Yeah,” he answered slowly. I could not see him in the darkened car, but from his voice I could tell he was smiling. “I guess there is . . . I guess there really is.”

  “See, I told you so,” Holly said in smug satisfaction.

  We assembled in the meeting room. Harbinger was preparing to brief us. We would be taking off within the next half hour. It was 4:00 a.m. Every available Hunter was assembled, including the untested Newbies, all of Harbinger’s team, Dorcas and the senior Shackleford. The conference room was crowded. Every other member of MHI in the country was currently en route.

  I sat down at the conference table next to Milo. He grinned when he saw me. The man was always in a good mood.

  “So did you get to meet Skippy’s people?”

  “Orcs,” I answered. “That was pretty cool.”

  “Yeah, they’re good folks. Homo-Ogrillion. We were hired to go into Uzbekistan and eradicate them. Turned out that they weren’t so evil after all, so we brought them all home. I’m glad we did.”

  Harbinger called the briefing to order. It took a few moments for the group to quiet down. Apparently word of the attack and all the gory details had spread quickly. Julie was sitting next to her grandfather, and his burned face was drawn into a tight grimace of pain and anger. I could not imagine how the man felt. Even if you had distanced yourself from a child who committed horrible crimes, he was still your child. And now he had lost that son.

  Harbinger cut right to the chase. “Everybody knows about what’s going on, and you’ve already heard about what happened earlier tonight. One former Hunter is dead. One current Hunter is missing. Turns out that one of our own is a Master vampire in the service of the Cursed One. We have a deal with the Feds. One team is going to go with them to Natchy Bottom to deal with the main bad guys. Every available Hunter is on the way. As they arrive, the rest of us will break into groups and handle the following undead outbreaks.” He pointed at the map of the Southeast that had been taped to the wall. It was dotted with red tacks.

  “Auburn, Gadsden, and Forestdale, Alabama; Columbus, Georgia; Pulaski, Tennessee; and Pensacola, Florida. Those are all confirmed vampires or wights. Boone’s team just cleared out some new creations in Atlanta. I felt bad calling them up since some of his men are still hurting from the freighter, but they rose to the occasion. And we have unconfirmed reports in Florence, Tupelo, Dothan, Fayetteville, Russellville and Demopolis, though those might just be regular missing persons, but I wouldn’t bet on it.”

  He paused long enough to take a drag off his cigarette. I had not seen him smoke indoors around the other Hunters before, but I was guessing that he was under more stress than normal.

  “As other teams arrive they will be diverted to those trouble spots. This is our turf, so local law enforcement knows us and is helping out. National Guard, same thing. Mostly they can be used as perimeter security, but if you think you can trust them, press them into service as well. We don’t have time to screw around, so if you find where the vamps are sleeping, just blow it straight to hell. We don’t have time to stake and chop and all that. If they’re in a mine, collapse it. If they’re in a building, burn it down. If you need to, borrow a tank from the National Guard. If they’re inside something that you can’t justify blowing up, then do what you have to do.”

  “How many threats are we talking about?” Sam asked.

  “Potentially hundreds.” There was some murmuring and swearing at that, from everybody except the untested Newbies who had not yet seen a real undead. “We always thought that vampires were limited in the number of new creations they could make. That was always our theory on how come they didn’t just bite everybody and overrun us. Looks like we were wrong, at least when it comes to Masters. We’re looking at a few different threats here, so let me break it down. Somehow the CO is able to bring people back as wights. Then we have two kinds of vamps, the regular new creations, where somebody is just killed and comes back as one, and apparently a stronger, smarter type, made by biting the victim, and then giving them some of the Master vampire’s own blood and power.”

  “Like Darné?” I asked. The former French Hunter had been amazingly fast and seemed to be in full control of his faculties, unlike the more animalistic creatures that had been the other vampires.

  “Most likely. So we’re talking about some serious bad asses. Plus we know that he can animate gargoyles as well, though there have not been any sightings of those since the ones that Pitt and Julie killed. Nobody knows how long it takes to create one of those, or even how many he brought over to start with.”

  “What do we have?” Milo asked.

  “Counting us and the Newbies, we have about twelve teams of Hunters. Six people in the hospital or on medical leave. Seventy total personnel available,” Julie answered.

  “Seventy-one,” her grandfather said from the head of the table. He pulled a well-oiled S&W 1917 from under his sweater and put it on the table with a clunk. “I ain’t sitting this one out.”

  “But, Grandpa . . .” Julie said.

  “Whoever thought I would get to live this long anyway, kid? This old man is looking for a fight. These bastards killed my boy, even if he was a crazy son of a bitch himself. Monsters don’t get to kill a Shackleford and get away with it. It sets bad precedent.”

  “Seventy-two,” Dorcas added, her grandmotherly looks not quite matching the steel in her voice. “Try to stop me, you’ll be tasting my plastic foot. I can still run a machine gun with the best of them.”

  “We help,” said a gravelly voice from the doorway. I had not heard Skippy approach. “Ten warriors . . . Five who heal . . . Ride to battle . . . Slay many foes.”

  “Skippy, you don’t have to. Your people are so few in number as it is,” Harbinger said.

  “Harb Anger deny us . . . honor . . . of battle?” Skippy asked. His voice sounded extra distorted through his flight helmet’s face shield.

  “No. Of course not.” The Director bowed his head. “My clan thanks you for your brave warriors.”

  “Eighty-seven total staff then,” Julie said. “Against probably double that number of powerful undead and who knows what, spread from one corner of the South to the other.”

  Eighty-eight, said the voice of the Old Man in my head. I wished he would stop doing that. It freaked me out. I may have a weird job, but that doesn’t mean that I liked hearing voices in my head.

  “Who’s going to Natchy Bottom?” Sam asked.

  “Feds are going to be the ones doing all of the fighting, and we can let them be the muscle. So we’ll just take the Hind. Skippy flies of course, and one can ride co-pilot. Then we can fit eight plus gear.”

  “I’m going,” Julie said.

  “No. You’re injured, and I need you here to coordinate the arriving teams.”

  “Bullshit,” she snapped. “This is personal.”

  “I know, and that’s why you ain’t going,” Harbinger stated.

  “Wrong. I’m on that helicopter or you can have my resignation right now, and I’ll drive up there myself.” Julie stood up from the table. “Don’t push me, Earl. She’s going to be there, and she isn’t going to rest until she gets me too.”

  Harbinger slowly nodded, his cigarette dangling from his lips. “Fine,” he said. “Julie, Sam, Milo, so my whole team. Pitt, he knows the bad guys better than anybody. That leaves four volunteers. Keep in mind, this is probably going to be real dangerous. Most likely all seven of the Masters plus whatever powers that the Cursed One himself has.”

  “I’m going,??
? Trip said, surprising no one.

  “You feel up to it?”

  “What, this?” He pointed at his battered face. “Just a scratch.”

  “I’m in,” Holly stated. “Any excuse to kill something.”

  “Me too,” Albert Lee offered.

  “Nope. Your ribs are still jacked up. No offense, Lee, but if anything, you’re going to run support for a local team. Sorry. Two more.” He pointed at Dorcas. “Oh hell no. Don’t even think about it. If Julie’s going, I definitely need you here to coordinate. Once that’s done then you can go get yourself killed all you want.”

  The older woman slowly lowered her hand.

  Lee raised his hand again. “Mr. Harbinger, sir. I can do it. I feel a lot better. I won’t slow us down, plus I’ve been doing nothing but studying the archives for the last week. Maybe something I learned can help.” You had to admire our demolitionist librarian. It took some guts to stand up to Harbinger’s overwhelming presence. “It wasn’t even a real break, just a minor fracture, and Gretchen gave me some stuff, said that I’m good to go.”

  Harbinger scowled and thought about it for a moment. “Fine, Lee. You’re on.”

  “I could go,” stated Julie’s grandfather. She gasped. “But I’m afraid I would just slow you down.” There were a few relieved sighs at that. I could not imagine that Harbinger could order around the president of the company.

  “Brother . . .” Skippy said. “Exszrsd, Edward, Ed . . . great warrior. Much honor clan to go . . .”

  “The dude with the swords?” Milo asked. He mimicked swinging swords around his head.

  “Yes. Ed with swords. He go too.”

  “Hell yeah,” Sam said. “He’s one bad dude.”

  “That’s a full chopper,” Harbinger said. He glanced down at his watch. “Hurley’s team is due to hit Pensacola shortly. Boone’s en route to Gadsden. Scramble the others as needed. Boss, Dorcas, shuffle the Newbies off to any teams that are shorthanded. It’s all yours. This is it. For you Newbies who have not fought yet. Don’t worry, you’ve been trained. You know what to do. Stick with your team leads, and do what they tell you. You’ll be fine. Now let’s go to work. The world is counting on us.”